Running away from Gibson

Grappling with the 'Mel factor'Even before Mel Gibson's drunken, anti-Semitic tirade this summer, his upcoming film "Apocalypto" was a tough sell.

Graphically violent, subtitled and cast with relatively unknown actors who speak their lines in an obscure dialect, Gibson's tale of a collapsing Mayan civilization was already outside Hollywood's mainstream fare. Then came Gibson's humiliating drunken driving arrest on a Malibu highway in July, which overnight threatened to turn the Oscar-winning director from the film's biggest asset into its biggest liability.

Starting Thanksgiving night, distributor Walt Disney Studios kicks off a campaign aimed at shifting attention from Gibson's foibles and onto his movie. Up against what the industry is calling "the Mel factor," the director will appear on a prime-time special on Disney's ABC network, hoping to blunt any damage that he may have caused "Apocalypto."